SANTA ROSA — Ygrene Energy Fund, which sets up and manages property-assessed clean energy project financing for local governments, on Wednesday said it has teamed with a large public agency provider of home purchase and retrofit loans to expand its program statewide.

SANTA ROSA — Noisy, inefficient, gas-guzzling garbage trucks may soon be a thing of the past. In the next couple of months, the Ratto Group, which hauls commercial and residential trash and recycling in Sonoma, Marin and Mendocino counties, will be taking delivery of a prototype, retrofitted electric garbage truck.

ANGWIN — Less than a year after launching in a small industrial space in the Angwin community atop Howell Mountain in Napa County, Deep Root Irrigation, LLC, is preparing to greatly crank up production of its water-miserly subterranean adaptation of soaker hoses as the DRI product gets increasing attention from water-conscious farmers in the North Coast and abroad.

Electric garbage trucks may roll down our streets soon thanks to an innovative partnership between the Ratto Group and Wrightspeed, a company created by Tesla co-founder, Ian Wright. The ground-breaking project demonstrates the power of clean energy’s benefit to the environment and to a company’s bottom line.

Based in Napa with eight full-time employees, Lyve offers a range of systems to treat wastewater flows from 1,000 to 1 million gallons per day. In addition to the design and manufacturing of winery wastewater treatment systems, Lyve also provides smart remote monitoring, round-the-clock service and complete control and management of equipment and operations.

SAN RAFAEL — PulpWorks, a San Rafael-based company that uses recycled paper pulp to replace PVC packaging, won the top prize at the sixth annual North Bay Innovation Summit in September.

The company, founded in 2011, aims to sell sustainable packaging to such companies as Wal-Mart, Clorox and Procter & Gamble. Current customers include EO Products, which makes bath and skin care products and is based in San Rafael, and Groupon, headquartered in Chicago. The packaging replaces blister packaging made of preformed plastic.

ROHNERT PARK — Want to invest money in a startup in hopes of a big payoff when the company goes public? Good luck with that. Investing in startups is not for the faint-of-heart or for those who want their money back inside of a decade.

ROHNERT PARK — SoCo Nexus chairman Lindsay Austin was former vice president of sales and marketing at Uniphase, which merged with JDS to become JDSU. The company has a large Santa Rosa operation with some 400 employees, acquired in 2000 when it was Optical Coating Laboratory Inc. and a major JDS supplier.